It happens to everyone. People misplace things all the time—a wristwatch, a set of keys, the remote control for the VCR. That, after all, is part of being human. So it only stands to reason that the United States government, an organization composed largely of human beings, would once in a while misplace something or other. Carl Olson says that it has misplaced about 1.5 million square miles of territory.

Olson, a man whose flat midwestern accent and persistent geniality make him sound less like a political agitator than like a letter carrier in a 1950s television comedy, is the founder and chairman of State Department Watch, a small organization dedicated to, as he describes it, "following the bizarre behavior of the State Department." But his main concern seems to be this matter of the government's somehow "losing" a chunk of the planet the size of India and Pakistan put together. Specifically, Olson says that the government has, one way or another, let go of nearly two dozen American islands and reefs, allowing them to be claimed by other nations, including Haiti, Venezuela, Colombia, Honduras, the Cook Islands, Kiribati, and—worst of all, as far as Olson is concerned—Russia and Cuba. "Who won the Cold War anyway?" he asks.

Olson believes that the United States has lost three groups of islands: one off the coast of Alaska, one in the central Pacific, and one in the Caribbean. He asserts that some of the lost Alaskan islands—there are eight in all, including Wrangel Island, which he describes as being "the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined"—were acquired from Russia in the 1867 Alaska Purchase and that the rest were claimed for the United States upon their discovery, by various explorers, in 1881. Today, though, they are all claimed by Russia—something that is not contested by the United States. This bothers Olson. A lot. He filed several inquiries with the State Department and never, he says, received a satisfactory response. Then he got creative: he wrote to the Census Bureau and asked why these islands were not included in its decennial census. He found the bureau's response somewhat more satisfactory. "They're actually willing to take on the State Department," he says.

Yet Robert Marx, the chief of the Census Bureau's Geography Division and the man who is handling Olson's inquiries, regards the matter not with Olson's righteous indignation but with bemused trepidation. Marx did file inquiries on the Alaskan islands—not with the State Department but with the state of Alaska. Alaska, however, confirmed that the islands do belong to Russia. And Marx has dealt with State Department Watch before.

"This group raised a similar set of issues after the 1990 census," he explains. "We referred the matter to the State Department, and it confirmed the boundaries and said this was a state matter. And the state of Alaska confirmed the State Department's assessment. Alaska is perfectly comfortable with what it has, which, I guess, means there isn't any oil there."

"The boundary identified by the 1867 treaty," Marx adds, "says these islands were never included in the sale of Alaskan territory to the United States of America. They were always the property of Russia."

Olson disputes this. Three of the eight islands "are clearly part of the treaty," he says. "And the others couldn't have been part of the treaty, because they weren't discovered until 1881—and claimed for the United States." Marx argues that the fact that an American claimed an island for the United States doesn't necessarily make it U.S. territory, but Olson counters that discovering and claiming islands for the United States was the express purpose of the 1881 expeditions. As for Alaska's opinion, Olson points to a resolution passed in 1999 by the Alaska state legislature in which that body did claim sovereignty over the islands. "It doesn't carry any legal weight—it's just an expression of their opinion," Olson admits, "but that's a political issue. The legislature voted for it almost unanimously, but the governor and the attorney general are against it. They're the ones with the power to do something about this, but they're inclined to go along with whatever the State Department says."

The rest of the islands in question, those in the Caribbean and the Pacific, were either taken by the United States during the Spanish-American War, Olson says, or acquired under the Guano Islands Act of 1856—arguably the best-named piece of legislation in American history. The latter acquisitions, Olson explains, "contained vast bird-guano deposits, which are full of rich mineral compounds used in agricultural fertilizers." Also at stake are many thousands of square miles of rich fishery zones and repositories of natural resources—including, quite possibly, oil. But what galls Olson the most is several Caribbean islands that, he says, were taken by the military in 1898 and not ceded to the independent nation of Cuba upon its creation, in 1902, but that inexplicably seem to belong to Cuba now. "So Castro's got a bonus somehow," Olson says. "Air space, economic zones, fishing rights, mineral rights." Marx says that the Census Bureau has filed inquiries on those islands with the State Department.

But the State Department is a huge and labyrinthine organization, and finding someone there who has answers to offer—let alone getting that someone to actually offer them—is a tricky process. Marx sent his inquiries to William B. Wood, who heads the department's Office of the Geographer and Global Issues. Wood passed them on to a staffer, Leo Dillon, who is quick to state that he cannot state very much. "Our office can only confirm that according to our records, the U.S. has no claims to any of those islands," Dillon says. Besides, he adds, "the guano has been taken from those islands," although he then admits he's not sure that's actually true. However, he does acknowledge that there are two Caribbean islands—Serranilla Bank and Bajo Nuevo—to which the United States has not repudiated its claim, even though other countries claim them as well. But he considers Olson's other arguments ludicrous; and anyway, Dillon says, "we deal with sovereignty from the current, not the historical, perspective." These were questions for the State Department's legal division, and he has already forwarded Marx's inquiries to that office.

The issue of the Caribbean islands was handed over to Paolo Di Rosa, at the State Department's legal office for Western Hemisphere affairs. Di Rosa acknowledges only that he has indeed been assigned to handle the matter and that "different islands are in a different status." Asked about Serranilla Bank and Bajo Nuevo, he responds cryptically: "Some of these islands or banks or whatever, we have asserted sovereignty over in various international contexts, even in the face of competing claims from other countries, and we consider our claims superior." He adds, "Some of the islands, we just have no idea where they are; they don't appear on our geographers' maps—we don't know anything about them."

Di Rosa's counterpart at the legal office for East Asian and Pacific affairs, James Hergen, is even less specific regarding the status of the Pacific islands: "I have no position on it at all," he states cheerfully. He has passed Olson's inquiries on to the governments of Kiribati and the Cook Islands, he says, but "I'm still waiting to hear back." The situation reminds him vaguely of the flap over the Alaskan islands following the 1990 census. "I don't remember all that much about it," he says, "but the thing that struck me is that it took up a tremendous amount of time—and taxpayers' money."

Hergen isn't really angry about it, though; merely resigned and a bit leery. "Every once in a while we get into these island-type stories," he muses, "and they're fun, but they're kind of spooky." Spooky? "I don't even know if these islands are above ground or populated or what," he explains. "Do you know?"

It's a good question, and one that even Carl Olson admits he cannot answer. If, as many suspect, most or even all of these islands are uninhabited and uninhabitable (if, indeed, some of them are little more than sandbars), then the most disinterested party in the whole affair, the Census Bureau, has no one to count and no reason to press its inquiries further.

But that will not stop Carl Olson from continuing to press his. Whether or not these islands are populated or even hospitable to human habitation is beside the point, in his view. "We think it's an abuse of power by the State Department," he declares. "The public didn't know anything about this. United States territory cannot be sold or given away to another country without a formal treaty, ratified by Congress, and there was none for any of these islands. How could numerous islands just willy-nilly float off to another country without a treaty? It seems kind of suspect."

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.